So this album is made entirely in Mixtikl an application that is high up on my list to try but just have not found time for it yet and will wait until some more convenient time as it seems deep and interesting.

Here follows the text that accompanies the album on the Bandcamp site:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SSDL1746 music for apps: mixtikl - an eternal album

release date: 20130417 label: pureambient

last updated: 20130818 current count of tracks: 12

this is the fourth of many dave stafford "eternal albums" to come - albums that have no finite number of tracks or end date. as time goes on, I will add more and more tracks (which will be at a special low price) with no limit on the number of tracks or the amount of time that passes.

in this day and age, the "album" concept seems, perhaps, a little bit outmoded, and while I will still create traditional albums and also, offer my extensive back catalogue in traditional album form, I feel the time has come for something a little more...flexible.

mixtikl is my other favourite generative music tool, and I absolutely love creating music with it. it's well suited for ambient, as the tracks here demonstrate, but it's also capable of creating much more active music, including music with drums and percussion.

the design of mixtikl is excellent, it's complex, but you can still create tracks fairly quickly without having to fully understand what you are doing (in fact, that may be preferable!) - or, you can go as deep as you want to, adding different effects to each sound source, plus global effects, and the mixing / layering / sound design possibilities of mixtikl are nearly endless - the mass of high quality samples provided mean that you can reconfigure the sounds into an almost infinite number of configurations - the ultimate in generative music flexibility - but, with consistently beautiful results.

I should note, for fans of my ambient music – music made with this application can be ambient, but many of the pieces may also be quite active; therefore, not like my usual ambient work – I will mark each track as ambient or active where possible, so: this album will contain a mixture of ambient and active tracks.

I've been playing the piano since I was very young, and synths since I first had them available, and having applications like this one (and many others to come) to work with, is a great opportunity for me to play some different kinds of music that are synth or sequenced-based, or in this case, generative - rather than guitar / guitar synth, energy bow or loop based.

so sit back, and enjoy the ride, the joy of discovering the brilliance of the mixtikl application and the unique music that can be made with it - from now until bandcamp is no more...

technical note: these are the unaltered original master recordings, newly re-mastered during summer, 2013. these new stereo masters were transferred with no alterations, and no effects or reverb being added to the tracks; in other words, no changes whatsoever to the natural sound of the samples, and the compositions they were used in, were made.

approximately four seconds of silence has been added to the end of each recording, to allow for any running order that you, the customer, desires (since this is a completely user-configurable album); this added silence in no way affects the quality of the tunes.

it's also advised that this music be listened to through headphones to experience the full stereo effect - we feel that the tracks are best experienced via headphones; in stereo - if this isn't possible, then the best available stereo speakers will have to suffice.

finally - thank you for listening!---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mixtikl on an Android related website? Now that made me curious. There is no mixtikl in the Google Appstore but in an obscure Amazon Appstore? What is the reason for that nonsense? Are they crazy to force their users to install another strange appstore from amazon?

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Frank Malm

8/27/2013 09:06:32 pm

That is actually the main reason I have not tried Mixtikl yet-
As i do not feel like signing up for another account to keep track off...
Maybe a little bit silly as it is not such a big deal but with all the small accounts here and there drives me crazy.

First of all, i would like to thank the nice people at musical android for copying the entire text of my mixtikl eternal album, I just wanted to give a quick update and also say a few words about mixtikl itself.

When this was posted, the album contained just 12 tracks, but since that date, I really, really got into composing with mixtikl, and in a very short time, I found to my everlasting amazement that I had created a massive body of work using this remarkable ambient generative tool, To the tune of 61 completed full length compositions; so if the original 12 were perhaps, somewhat underwhelming (being, after all, my very first very experimental pieces using the app) I would suggest trying out some of the later pieces, or start with track 61 and go back through the tracks...

I found that I was able to do much, much more than ambient, I did some really nice jazzy grooves which surprised me, and even a quasi-prog piece, too, so, a very versatile tool.

I had worked previously with Eno's 'Scape' application, for a few months, and I ended up creating well over a thousand scapes, but then, I turned to mixtikl, and after a few months working with it, I found that I actually prefer it to Scape!!! And Scape is an awesome ambient generative application...

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